Interviews

Alone in the Dark Producer Q&A

GameSpy: What kind of balance can we expect between open gameplay areas and rail sections (such as the driving portion as New York collapses around you)?

Nour Polloni: There are very few sections where you have to follow a very specific path like the 59th Street part you mention. Most of the gameplay is set in open areas that you explore and move around at will. Most of the time you will be following clear objectives, so there will be things you have to do and a certain way you need to go to move on and follow the story.

Once you get into Central Park later in the game though, pretty much the whole park is yours to explore with plenty of things to do as a diversion from the main story which of course you can go back to at any time.

GameSpy: Shed some light on how Carnby is hanging out in modern times, please!

Nour Polloni: The reason behind Carnby's sudden appearance in 2008 not having aged a day is central to the story, and we're really not going to give away any more than that right now. Sorry!

GameSpy: Why spend so much time and energy on the flame and light effects?

Nour Polloni: There are two things here: one is the use of light in creating the atmosphere. Our technology lets us use a virtually unlimited number of real-time lights in any given scene; in fact we're only limited by the number of pixels the hardware can display, not the number of lights. This lets us be really creative with the use of light in generating a really striking ambience and adding to the unsettling atmosphere of the game world.

The second thing is the use of light in gameplay itself. It wouldn't be Alone in the Dark if you didn't have to find a way to light your path through dark places. Of course there's a flashlight, but we've played a lot with other light sources such as glow sticks, and especially fire. Fire became a very important element for us early in the design process to bring something really new and fun to the gameplay, and we spent a year getting it to look right and to realistically emulate propagation across flammable objects and surfaces. This opens up a huge number of gameplay possibilities not only for lighting your way, but for creating unique weapons and getting through tricky situations. Fire itself is your number-one weapon against most of the enemies you meet in the game, but it can turn on you too.

GameSpy: What makes the jacket-liner inventory screen preferable to a traditional inventory system?

Nour Polloni: We wanted to create a game where the player is immersed in the action to the point where they never actually have to leave the game world, and that includes avoiding menu screens which take the player out of the action.

Having the inventory in real time in the jacket also adds another dimension of pressure -– you can't just use the inventory like a pause button and you have to act fast if something's coming at you. That said, we also had to make sure that desperately trying to select and combine items while trying to survive a full-on attack wasn't frustrating for the player.

To make things faster we added two systems: a quick-draw button which lets you take out and put away the last item you used and also lets you scroll quickly through different items in your inventory without having to go into your jacket, and a quick-select system that lets you assign favorite combinations of items to a single button push.

GameSpy: How many effective combinations of items are we actually going to see? Is the lighter+hairspray style system actually expanding players' range of items, or is it adding a step between getting items and being able to use them?

Nour Polloni: This isn't a shooter where you get given a set of weapons, upgrade them, get more and just blow stuff up. This game is about using your environment to survive and applying your instincts and understanding of how things behave in the real world. We don't want to burden the player with loads of weapons –- it's about being clever with what you've got, and one thing can become an arsenal in the right hands. If you pick up a can of health spray you've immediately got choices: you can heal yourself of course, combine it with a lighter to make a flame thrower as you know, launch it at a target then shoot it on impact to make a bomb, or even add some sticky tape to it, throw it at a rat so it sticks to its back, watch it run back to its friends gorging on a corpse, then fire off a round sending the whole rat gang up in flames.

We're opening up possibilities for the player with this system -– every player will find weapons they love and use throughout the game and they could be weapons no one else has thought of. That's really exciting.